A Nazi yellow star as political prop in Kansas today isn’t just dumb. It’s immoral
Recently, a Kansas legislator compared state masking and vaccine requirements to Nazi treatment of Jews in the Holocaust, and a prominent state International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers official said forcing non-vaccinated people to wear masks would be tantamount to compelling the yellow stars Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany.
Why are these comparisons not only inflammatory, but immoral and shameful to their speakers?
The intention of Nazi persecution of Jews was genocide: the murder of an entire people simply for the sin of breathing. To unite Germany against a common enemy, the Nazis scapegoated Jews as racially inferior and unworthy of life, the cause of Germany’s failures. The yellow star proclaimed the wearer to be subhuman.
To dehumanize Jews, the Nazis removed all legal protections, allowing Jews to be murdered in the streets. They declared Jews were swine.
Inflammatory rhetoric assaults our ears in these uncivil times, startling like an exploding M-80 firecracker. Honest, forthright speaking often takes second place to insult and shock. Verbal muggings occur so frequently that I know psychologists advising clients to turn off the evening news to avoid the resultant jarring upset.
Words matter. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” has become a lie. Scurrilous words may energize and encourage criminals nurturing destructive intentions. Within my memory, Kansas was a place where neighborliness outweighed politics and Christian kindness resulted in acceptance of even the stranger. Now, triumph and polarization are the goals, and tribal loyalty the pathway to achieve them.
Various governments around the U.S. and the whole world have deployed limited mask mandates and ordered many to be vaccinated against a deadly virus to protect life and restore the economy. Some Americans feel these orders encroach upon their personal freedom, injuring their right to self-determination. Some believe the government to be launching the first step on the road to greater autocratic control. But there is no similarity between Nazi extermination of Jews and America’s attempts to exterminate COVID-19. The Nazi intention was to destroy an entire civilization. The American intention is to save lives. Agree or disagree with the means, they are not even vaguely similar goals.
I understand that the yellow star designating Jews under the Nazis was government coercion. But today, no one claims the government is engaged in genocide. No one is accusing those refusing to wear masks of being subhuman, nor denying their right to life. No one threatens them with extinction simply because they exist. Implying a similarity is disingenuous and immoral, declaring political disagreement the equivalent of dehumanization and murder.
The goal of genocide comprised a second front in Germany’s war. The first was winning World War II. The second: the war against the Jews. The Nazis compromised their war effort to achieve victory in their extermination of the Jewish people. Trains required for military objectives were instead diverted to herd Jews to death camps. So vicious and determined was their hatred that Adolf Hitler sacrificed military triumph to kill innocents.
Referring to the yellow star invokes all of this, not simply some vague political notion of excessive government interference in private lives.
Perhaps to a few souls in Kansas and around the U.S., the yellow star symbolizes government coercion. But for Jews, the yellow star brings personal, existential threats against each of us. Will such misuse of language harm the innocent? Is it simply overblown rhetoric? Invoking the symbols the Nazis used to destroy our people not only repeats the trauma in our collective memory, but it also potentially motivates today’s haters to transform rhetoric into action.
The murderers of Jews in both Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2018 and Poway, California, in 2019 were persuaded to murder innocent, unarmed people by their irrational conviction that Jews are attempting to destroy white America. Such bigoted hatreds may be invoked by Nazi symbols such as the yellow star, and pose threats to the Jewish community.
Words matter. Images matter. People in responsible positions must act responsibly.